Aipoly - App of the month, January 2016

Posted:

19 January 2016

Introducing: Aipoly

Aipoly is an object and colour recogniser that helps the blind, visually impaired, and color blind understand their surroundings. Simply point your phone at the object of interest and press the large toggle button at the bottom of the screen to turn on the artificial intelligence.

Aipoly will keep running and recognizing objects until you switch to a different tab, or toggle the Aipoly button.

Aipoly is suited for both the visually impaired and the sighted.

Recognise Objects: Aipoly can recognize a wide variety of objects at a rate of three times a second. Simply switch on the Aipoly button and it will start identifying what it sees through the camera. Recognizing objects does not require an internet connection.

Recognise Colors: Aipoly can tell up to 954 colors apart. The list can also be simplified to a few through the settings if you are unfamiliar with most color names.

Teach Aipoly: Aipoly will learn more object if its users help it by writing descriptions of what it sees. This is a good way for sighted users to help the visually impaired. Press the pencil button once object recognition is toggled on to write a description of the object or scene in focus. Detailed descriptions work best. Over time, Aipoly will begin learning about more items thanks to its users.

Voiceover: For those with Voiceover switched on, simply access the text above the toggle button. For those who are sighted and do not require Voiceover, you can access the Speaking Voice setting to listen to what the app can see.

Voice Modes: You can switch between different voice modes in the settings page. Ranging from standard, which says one word at a time, to advanced for multiple words, to likelihood and fun, which express the likelihood of the item viewed and add additional captions respectively.

Intelligent Torch: When Aipoly detects darkness through the camera, it will automatically turn on the torch so you don't have to worry about lighting. When the light is switched on, it will turn the torch off.

Aipoly works on:

iPhone 5S

iPhone 6

iPhone 6Plus

iPhone 6S

iPhone 6S Plus

iPad Air and above.

iPad Mini 2 and above.

What’s so great about “Aipoly”

AiPoly is an interesting and potentially very useful application for helping you to understand the world around you. It has a simple interface and when activated will – in real-time – give you an accurate or best guess on objects your phone camera sees. It has three modes for object recognition including best guess humorous modes, so can be fun to use. You can train Poly to recognise objects correctly too; simply double tap the pencil button on the incorrectly tagged object and type the correct description which will be remembered for next time. In this way, you help to improve detection and these improvements can be retained in future releases. There is also a colour recogniser too, which gives you a colour for objects it sees, though this is a separate mode and should be considered a separate tool, somewhat like a colour identifier.

Where do I get it?

User comments

This app shows considerable potential and its real-time recognition of objects will help in all manner of situations, from identifying the environment around you to getting a better understanding of what colour something is, this app can also engage you with its witty object recognitions when using the fun mode.

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